The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
There may be limited ways to exchange user equipment (“UE”), base station (e.g., Evolved Node B, or “eNB”), and/or over-the-top (“OTT”) application configuration data over an air interface of a wireless wide area network (“WWAN”). As a result, OTT applications (e.g., video chat, streaming video, web browsers, etc.) may use the same best effort (e.g., non-guaranteed bit rate) radio bearer, regardless of whether the OTT application is real time or non-real time, without Quality of Service (“QoS”) differentiation.
Additionally, a base station such as an eNB may transition UEs it serves from an active mode (e.g., “connected”) to an inactive mode (e.g., “idle”), e.g., if a UE is inactive for longer than a predetermined inactivity time interval. For instance, if the eNB is configured with an inactivity time interval of five seconds, the eNB may trigger a UE to transition to idle if the UE is inactive for more than five seconds. However, an “application function” (e.g., any logic hosted anywhere on a WWAN or a public data network, or “PDN”) may periodically transmit recurring notifications such as “keep-alive” messages to corresponding logic operating on the UE. If a time interval between transmission of keep-alive messages is less than the serving eNB's inactivity time interval, then the UE may remain in active mode. However, if the time interval between keep-alive messages is greater than the eNB's inactivity time interval, then the UE may repeatedly transition to idle mode, only to be “re-awakened” by recurring keep-alive messages. These transitions may consume computing and network resources.